It can be really beneficial to travel around the world and attend live matches or evaluate players up-and-close. The opportunity to evaluate from the stands, watch the warming-up and talk to people around the club is very valuable. At the same time, live scouting can be really inefficient when it isn’t applied properly. More and more methods are available to narrow down the number of live scouting trips and save time and money.
Attend less matches live
At 11tegen11 Scouting, we use every useful digital resource to compile shortlists. They represent the most interesting players per position or per region. This creates focus: live scouting can be done much more efficiently by using it more as a final stage evaluation tool rather than as a means of identifying potentially interesting players in the first place. Digital scouting considerably reduces the number of expensive, labor intensive scouting trips.
Focus on the best players
Most clubs receives tons of tips from agents on a daily basis. Experience and an extensive network help to separate the good from the bad agents. This is useful to decide which players to spend time on and which players to cross out immediately. On the other hand, a bad agent could offer a good player and vice versa.
Digital scouting can be used to check very fast to see which players deserve a more in-depth evaluation. We do so by using data analysis as a first filter and video scouting as a second filter. This provides the club with much more oversight when it comes to filtering the vast pool of players, who are offered on a near-continuous basis.
Reduce unsuccessful transfers
With our digital scouting support, we can reduce the number of unsuccessful transfers in two different ways.
Independent advice
One of the biggest reasons that so many unsuccessful transfers occur, is the fact that people at the same club are very rarely able to evaluate a player independent of the established opinion. By sharing opinions about a player in meetings or in software such as Scout7, they influence each other heavily and tunnel vision is a real danger. This process tends to occur unconsciously and is hard to combat. By cooperating with an independent, external organisation, the autonomous advice can raise new questions and provide different perspectives.
Different perspective
Besides being independent, we also evaluate players differently than most clubs do. By using advanced data analysis, we zoom in on strengths and weaknesses that a player shows throughout several seasons. Evaluating such a big number of games is much harder – if not impossible – with live scouting or only video scouting. We combine this data analysis with extensive video scouting. In WyScout, we focus on the most important clips of a player throughout nine to twelve matches. This is done by three different video scouts, working independently of each other. This way, we come to a balanced, independent opinion about a potential transfer target.
Income from player sales
Every club has their own relatively stabile revenues from ticket sale, sponsorships, merchandise, broadcasting, etcetera. To increase the income of the club, outgoing transfers are can make a significant difference. Transfer revenues do not offer a constant cash flow but can provide an immediate lift for a short period of time to implement sustainable changes.
A very good way to sign players who can be sold with a big profit is by looking beyond the scope of your competitors. When sticking to the same regional matches, and talking to the same agencies offering their players, you basically rely on the recruitment team to make all of the difference. Broadening the scope of players evaluated will give the recruitment team more options and improve the outcome.
Save time and money
Investing in digital scouting is a very smart thing to do for any club. It helps the club save time and money by reducing resources spent on live scouting and bringing down the number of unsuccessful transfers. In addition, digital scouting facilitates focusing on the most interesting players early in the scouting process.
At 11tegen11 Scouting, we would love to get in touch with clubs who think of it this way. Let’s schedule a 30 minute video call to exchange information about how we could cooperate in the future.
